More than one-sixth of the population has tuned into the seemingly endless series of qualifying heats and exclusion round – an amazing 23 millions have been cast for contestants on successive Saturday nights. It has made TV stars of the show’s judges (especially the abrasive Simon Cowell) and especially of its two final contenders. The nation will be noisily spilt this weekend between those voting for Gareth Gates, the heartbreakingly sweet, doe-faced 17-year-old with the appalling stammer, and Will, the perma-smiling 23-year-old Hungerford-born politics graduate whose face is a hybrid of Robbie Williams and the Joker in the first Batman movie, who can sing anything.The election battlebus is clever PR stunt that has taken both boys all over the metropolis for three days solid, doing radio interviews, meeting the commissars of the Entertainment press, bumping into stars (Joanna Lumley) at the BBC and playing childish japes with cardboard cut-outs of Madonna and Lara Croft. When I caught up with Will, he was on his way to meet Graham Norton, after encountering Tara Palmer-Tomkinson on a morning TV show.In the flesh he’s a terrific charmer in jeans, trainers, red sweatshirt and (a touch of the country squires) a Donegal tweed flat cap. For a youth already suspected of acquiring diva-celebrity airs, he’s strikingly direct and intelligent; he talks like a thoughtful student, holding ideas up to the light.”Pop Idol is all about opinions,” he said, “the judges’ opinion, the viewers’, the contestants’ – and about how opinions are offered and received. Maybe that’s why the country’s in a fervour about who should win Everybody feels they’ve got something invested in it.

But I don’t think it’s me myself they’re voting for, it’s the TV contestant, and in that context I’m very flattered by it all.”Did the concept of pop idolatry concern him, with inevitable associations with feet of clay? “I don’t see it like that. Performers over the ages have always given off a kind of energy, back to Roman times and the gladiators, who were the pop stars of the day. I think it’s about a whole image – the look, the clothes, the music – which puts a distance between you and other people. Audiences like to think that stars are different from them, aren’t ordinary people.

Although of course in Big Brother and Pop Idol, you watch the whole process taking shape, starting with people filling in an application form”.A far cry from your average inarticulate popster, Will Young was a rebel in his early teens, but a quiet conformist by the time he got to Wellington school at 14. He sang on stage in his prep school, but only began to take it seriously at Exeter University, where he studied politics. “Reading Marx pushed me into doing what I wanted to do,” he says. “It made me want to put a definite personal stamp on the world rather than just being part of the system I knew that lots of people do jobs they don’t want. I gave myself until the age of 30 to try and make a success of singing – if I hadn’t made it, by then, I’d just get a job.”Whether he’s beaten or not on Saturday by the dewy-eyed Gareth, the charming Mr Young’s future is assured. The runner-up, like the winner, will be contracted to Nicky Chapman, one of the judges, who runs 19 Management and will secure a recording deal as easily as humming “Evergreen”, the winner’s first single. “Every man wants to be a singer,” says Will wistfully, “and this show has seen that potential become a reality.” And he disappears up the bus stairs to prepare himself for the ordeal of being ogled and vamped by Graham Norton..